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We´re heading off to Cuzco tomorrow morning, which means that I´ll be away from the internet for a week.

For those in the States - stay cool! I hear it has been sweltering in parts of the country.

Not even a month until vows - crazy, huh? Please keep me and my classmates in your prayers and know that you are in mine (really - I pray generically for those who read my blog and for all those others I forget to mention by name...it´s a handy catch-all to pray for the whole world!)

Two weeks from today and I´ll be back home in (hopefully) sunny Detroit. While it is true that six weeks will have passed by - a scant amount when one really thinks about it - it is enough time to have had a deep and lasting effect on my spirit.

As I type this, I look through grime-covered windows out onto a busy street where dogs roam freely and men seem to take every occasion to relieve themselves against the wall directly across the street. Because Lima is situated in a desert and it hardly ever rains, there is no drainage so to speak so the urine pools on the side of the road and, even when it has evaporated, the stench does not dissipate. Poor children and their mothers beg me to buy gum and sweets and old persons in wheelchairs beg at the side of the road. Horns blare each night and with a dearth of traffic lights crossing the road can be a perilous adventure.

As you can see from the pics posted below, while there might not be much activity on the old blog, there´s certainly a great deal of ¨behind the scenes¨life!

We are preparing to enter our fourth week here in Lima. Truth be told, the time is really flying by. I feel that my skills in Spanish are increasing (in fact, I have only a few moments to blog as I need to translate a short article for class tomorrow). It has also been wonderful to get around the various cities surrounding Lima in order to see the life and culture of the people. We´ve met many people while on our adventures and with each encounter my love for this land and her people increases.

Below you will see a picture of ¨Raton Rosa¨ - a nickname she ratified, by the by! Arianna is a lovely young girl who rolls her ´r´perfectly when she calls my name, ¨gato rrrrrojo.¨ Indeed, just before this picture was taken she ´did´my hair by trying to spike what few strands I have into a point on the top of my head. Interestingly, I unde…

My given Spanish nickname is ¨Gato Rojo¨which means ¨red cat.¨ This is my little friend Arianna whose own name (which I gave her) is ¨Raton Rosada¨or ¨Pink Rat¨. This picture was taken after the children´s Mass in Miraflores.

So my morning began today at 3.50 am when the music from a party being held nextdoor actually shook my bed. With the dulcet tones of Peruvian rap pouring into my room, I set out in search of the source of the music. Ascending a flight of steps and walking out onto the roof, I followed the music to its source - a courtyard directly behind my room owned by a local garage. It seems that several of the employees had gathered to celebrate something and had brought along several cd´s...as well as some bloody powerful speakers.

Now, in order to see the gathered masses beneath me, I had to poke my head through several wires. Well, at 4.00 am it doesn´t readily or often occur to one torn from the womb of sleep that such wires just might carry an electric charge. So it really came as quite a shock - literally - when I began to feel electricity surging through my body once my head inadvertently made contact with one of these wires. It seems as though, in response to several thefts, the superior h…